“_Prison Methods; Formative and Reformative_.”
Crime is very largely due to poverty, or rather to what he called
misdirected energy, both of mind and soul, and is a problem in
sociology to direct activities from abnormal into normal channels.
He dwelt much on prison discipline as of the greatest importance,
and could not be too exacting, but that whatever methods might be
employed, no violence should be done to the man within the man; that
punishment should always be reformative. He spoke of the prisoner as
a social iconoclast, who had lost his ambition, his help, and who
sought to destroy what other men cherish. “It is the object of the
prison to teach such a personal respect for social obligations, that
nothing belongs to anyone except what he has gained by his brawn or his
brains.” He touched on the evils of saloons, and said: “Through the
doors of saloons to the prison doors pass one-half of the prisoners in
this State.”